Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

samzbest writes "According to ComScore's qSearch, Microsoft's retaliation against Google search, Bing, has gained significant market share, now facilitating close to 10% of US searches. That's a gain of two large points in five months."

Yea, because Google's idiotic toolbar being bundled with everything from the end user Java VM to Adobe PDF Reader is so different a tactic.

Well, MS is pushing out updates via OS updates.

I discovered the other day that IE on my XP box had suddenly decided that Bing was its default search engine, despite the fact that I'd previously set it to be Google.

I'm not saying I agree any more with the bundling of such things when you install other software (I don't), but Microsoft has an even more privileged access to my system in that they can push updates and I don't even get asked (other than agreeing to a cumulative security update with a long number and no real explanation). I certainly wasn't asked if IE could change its default search engine or to become the default browser (which has happened on occasion).

I have no doubt that a significant amount of their new-found market share was automatically set for users without their knowledge.

only time Windows Updates ever remotely came close to changing my search page is when it installed IE8 and it went through a wizard the first time I ran it and asked what I wanted my search page to be. Even then, I believe the default option was to keep my old search provider, which was imported from IE7 settings.

You're right, except for one thing: when installing IE8 (doesn't matter if it's from Windows Update, or manually), there is indeed a selection screen where you choose between "Express settings" (which sets your search engine to Bing, among other things) and "Custom settings". But neither one is the default - there is simply no active selection there when the screen loads, and "Next" button is disabled. You have to pick.

It is pretty upfront about what "Express" means, though (it's all listed right on that sc

Put it this way: if Google didn't piggyback on things like Acrobat or Java, they'd be wiped out by Microsoft. Most MSIE updates (and more than a few non-MSIE installs) over the past few years have switched users to MSN/Live/Bing/Whatever-its-called-this-year, and it's not at all easy to straightforward to change MSIE's search provider to Google. Heck, Bing is designed to look enough like Google that users aren't alerted sufficiently to the change

Java is my common irritant with this. Whenever you run the install it hides a checkbox to load some type of crapware by default. I think it actually looks at your computer because it never seems to offer a piece of junk that you already have. It has offered the Google toolbar, MSN toolbar, Open Office, and now:
Bing...

No, Bing [wikipedia.org] is a law professor known for having translated several good science fiction books to Norwegian long ago, and now being completely out of touch, in particular by having spectacularly un-enlightened views on copyright enforcement the need for IP law reform.

Are they only counting the places where people go to the page and do a search or are they counting all the 'embedded' searches which are snuck into other apps like IE and Windows Live to boost numbers?

Google search is embedded into a hojillion websites as well as having browser plugins / toolbars for pretty much every browser. If "embedded searches" are counted it'll probably be to Google's advantage.

(I'm not saying that the study isn't trickery. I wouldn't know either way.)

The trickery should be clear because microsoft is trying to gain marketshare by having articles posted every time they get 1/100^56th of a marketshare increase, even though nobody wants that piece of crap. 3%, 5%, 6%, etc. It's search results are crap even. You didn't hear google publicizing every 1% do ya?

To say they can't means the market isn't growing, which shows your lack of udnerstanding

Um, no, I think the lack is on your part [tvtropes.org]. Even a 100% monopoly can gain sales, but they can't increase market share -- that is, the fraction of the market they reach. If the number of searches doubled, and Bing doubles and Google doubled (pretending they're the only two engines), then their market share remains the same, 10% and 90% respectively.

Reasons? Sure. Any result on things is skewed if it relates to MS. How can you call that "reliable"? There's a reason they call it a decision engine and not a search engine. Also, why do I want something that's been rammed down my throat as a default setting? I'd rather choose my own thing not have *constant* hijacking during every IE security update. Just wait for people to do bing bombs as they call "google bombs", and you'll see even more manipulation.

I'm not going to dig all day, there are others, you don't think the press on this was accidental do you?

Dig all day? We've seen one claim from you that the results for "Least Secure OS" are skewed, when the initial results of both Google and Bing are identical. We've also seen you complain that when you type "Google" into Bing, you don't get the results you want (which apparently are something other than Google). Here for all to see are the comparison results: http://yfrog.com/5hgooglevbingp [yfrog.com]. I think the o

I love your comments. It proves ( at least in my eyes ) corporate evolution. In order to make money, you must improvise, improve and use less resources.

Google, the king of using less resources and improvising, is winning at this time. Microsoft, whom has the resources, is now investing in that side of the business, making themselves better and more productive.

for the end user, this is important, being able to choose whom you want to do your searches with is always a benefit. Now the real question is, the quality of the search results.

I would really enjoy if another search engine would join this field that was as innovative as Google, or had the resources of Microsoft, then a real good fight could happen, and the winner would be the end user.

microsoft is making themselves better and more productive? LOL I seriously hope you are joking. Bing is still very skewed to show positive results for things that MS is interested in gaining marketshare from. It's when people realize this, that they start to have less interest in bing. The only reason it has *any* marketshare beyond like 1% is being embedded and defaulted everywhere.

Microsoft, like EA, has been redeeming themselves for the past couple of years. Much like EA realized they were screwed due to their draconian DRM, Microsoft realized it screwed the pooch with Vista. They really have been turning things around, and they seem to be making their business more nimble and listening to what their customers truly want (excluding WinMo 6.5).

A monster like Microsoft can't change direction on a whim. It takes time. Windows 7 is a decent indicator of where they are headed.

What are you talking about? Dragon Age, their most recent release, has no DRM past an old school serial number and DVD check! There is no online activation required, no install limits, nothing. Now, granted, the downloadable content for it has DRM, but the base game itself has ZERO DRM.

I don't own it, but I believe Sims 3 shipped without DRM as well.

Perhaps you are referring to the Mass Effect and Spore debacles from a year or two ago?

microsoft is making themselves better and more productive? LOL I seriously hope you are joking. Bing is still very skewed to show positive results for things that MS is interested in gaining marketshare from.

I really doubt it. I just did a search for "virtual machines". Something that Microsoft would dearly love to increase its market share in. The first result was a Wikipedia article. The second was VMWare, the third was from Sun, and the 4th was Virtual PC. If they were being biased, don't you think that they would put their product 1st?

Same thing with doing a search for "database servers". On Bing the first result to an actual product is the 5th entry and it's for MySQL. On Google, the first result to an actual product is the 4th entry and it's for Microsoft SQL server.

I could go on, but the reality is the reality is that Bing isn't that bad and no more biased to any of Microsoft's stuff then Google is.

I think the issue isn't so much one of search quality for most people as it is one of trust.
In the past, Microsoft have shown no compunction about distorting their search engine results
to advance their own agenda, and the recent "why is windows so expensive" debacle
suggests that they will probably do so again.

Added to that, there isn't actually anything wrong with Google's results, as such.
Room for improvement to be sure, but the reason I use Google is that it seemed to me to
deliver better results t

And yes, that is not a photochop, those were the real suggestions from bing. More recently they seem to have cleaned up their suggestions for Linux but who knows what other underhanded tactics they are using or what other search terms are "poisoned".

Therefore at least one reason Bing is piece of crap is because of it's evilness!

Nothing wrong inherently with evil, ya know. Nor is there anything inherently wrong with trying to scam off with Google's lunch. It's called 'business as usual', ya know. I checked Bing out when it first started getting airplay on tv, didn't see what all the excitement was about. IIRC, early results were heavily weighted to shill Microsoft products. Big surprise, eh? Now the recent XP/Vista updates toggle default browser search engines to Bing, Win7 ships with default search engine of Bing, any embedded native Windows search uses Bing, and it's a surprise that Bing picked up 10% of the search engine market? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...

Google took years to conquer the market and stomp on Altavista. Microsoft can do it with a click of an update button. Fun, eh? See you Patch Tuesday. And don't forget to click back to Google...

See, this is the asshat comments that drive me away from Slashdot. You stated that about Microsoft/Google in a way to present bias --- that MS is evil and Google is not. Microsoft *did* setup Bing to steal users --- that's how a business gets customers in an established area. You don't see McDonald's saying "No, we'll let them have the 30-39 age group" to KFC.

Google did the exact same thing. Or do you believe that they didn't setup a search engine to steal customers from Yahoo, Altavista, and others

I think it's different in that, Google has offered these things and people used them. Most of the Bing stuff that I have seen have been trying to sneak it in the back door or ram it down my throat. I will not Google for stuff on Bing.

> Are they only counting the places where people go> to the page and do a search or are they counting> all the 'embedded' searches which are snuck into> other apps like IE and Windows Live to boost numbers?

Don't be an idiot. This is Bing we're talking about, not Yahoo. Do you really think 10% of people go to it on purpose? Outside of extreme geekdom, nobody's even heard of it yet.

Basically what this means is IE8 has, mostly as a result of automatic updates, reached about 10% market share among people who think the browser's location bar is a search box and haven't bothered to express an opinion about what search engine it should use. IE8 ships with "Live Search", alias Bing, as the default; IE6 and IE7 used MSN Search as their default, so what we're seeing here is mostly new-version uptake.

There are also a few geeks using it on purpose to try it out, but even if 100% of the slashdot-reading population did that it wouldn't be anywhere near 1% market share, let alone 10%. And the single most popular search engine among the slashdot-reading geekdom is almost certainly still Google at this point.

No, the bulk of the 10% we're talking about here consists of people using the IE8 UI.

These increases are very likely to correlate (causally, no less!) to Infection Explorer 8 being pushed hard, leveraging the majority number of computers that have M-Windows installed.

Capitalism is about having or obtaining a large quantity of something at price P, "talking it up" through Marketing or other bovine excrement until people want it, and then setting new price NP > P when they come asking for it.

Or, in clearer Slashdot format:

1) Have a large install base.2) Push your browser hard onto the install base and set the default page to Bing (just as Google arranged with Mozilla).3) ???? (bovine excrement)4) PROFIT!!!

So you are saying Microsoft is leveraging an existing monopoly to force their way into other markets. Wow, that's pretty clever, and certainly innovative on their part. Surprised they didn't try that earlier.

I see a lot of people on the slickdeals.net and other "hot deals" forums using bing to take advantage of it's cashback ads.
(That is, you buy a product through a bing search, and you get a certain amount of money returned to you)

Also, don't forget that when Windows 7 came to mass market, Microsoft still didn't allow you to change the default search engine from Bing to Google in IE8. I tried several times and MS only allowed you to download 'something' Google-related (some plug-in) from their site that wasn't Google Search for the toolbar. It's only just recently they 'fixed' this.

Anyone who snagged Windows 7 early and was using IE8 (poor deluded souls) would possibly be contributing to this 10%. Since they fixed the 'glitch' maybe

It is worse than that. Let us say that you want Google as the default for said address bar search feature of IE8, and you go to the Microsoft tool for adding said capability and you look for Google, it is no where to be found. WHAT???? They have search tools I have barely heard of listed, but no GOOGLE????

It probably doesn't hurt that IE 8 updates make Bing the default search engine if you go the 'express' route. Even adding google as a search provider is weird - you can't just select it, you have to go to a web page and download the search engine provider package or whatever.

I recently installed the Google search provider in IE8. Not only did I have to "Find More Providers", but Google was hidden on the second page of the default list and mislabeled as "Google Search Suggestions".
Accidents.

I had the same experience - it took some digging to figure out how to make Google the default search provider, and there were several Googles listed on the page where Google eventually showed up and no good information on which to choose. Worse yet, I was in the process of installing Windows 7 and it decided to install updates after I'd done this, and somehow managed to reset the default search provider to Bing in one of those.

I had the same experience - it took some digging to figure out how to make Google the default search provider, and there were several Googles listed on the page where Google eventually showed up and no good information on which to choose.

Can you clarify the latter part? When I click on the dropdown arrow on the right of the search icon in IE, and select "Find More Providers...", it opens this page [ieaddons.com]. Google provider is indeed tucked away on the second page there, but so far as I can see, it's the only one with "Google" in its name.

I wonder if they get that far. I think Google is so fixated in the minds of people that it's hard to get it out. It's even on the homepages of not only younger people but also the digital elderly who are less computer savvy. Bing has to offer more and better search results then Google does before it gains any more then 20% of the market I think.

Don't forget, humans are conservative creatures, they only like changing when it saves money or reduces fat quickly.

It's not really news. Bing is just a rebranding of MSN Search. In June 2007, MSN had a spike of 16% market share (http://blog.compete.com/2007/07/09/june-search-share-msn-live-google-yahoo-ask/). Given the huge marketing behind Bing as well as the conversion of practically all search engines on every site that has anything to do with Microsoft, I would say, meh, no big deal.

Bing is not just a rebrand of Live/MSN Search. When they launched, they added tons of features and introduced new indexing and ranking algorithms that actually bought the results pretty much to same level as Google's, even if not over.

I find it hilarious that - even with the obvious money-under-the-table bias, even with the fact it's shoved in every IE user's face by default (and the fact changing the default on that is deliberately hard and confusing), they can still only get 10%.

Go ahead, you can probably blame some of this on me -- and people like me. I was in the market for an XBox 360 Arcade (with intent to add a HDD on my own) and had found through slick deals mention that if you went to bing and searched for Dell and clicked on the cashback link you could get an XBox 360 Arcade for 15%-30% off depending on when you do it.

Now, from what I read, your mileage may vary. Meaning you got anywhere from $20 to $30 off the price but you still paid $200. It was just recredited to your paypal account. It happened/happens with other large retailers like Amazon so I found myself periodically using Bing to squeeze 10% off a purchase here or there... or even just hitting it up every couple days to see what I could find. Kept with Google on my other searches (Firefox and Chrome still put me through the same default search engine). But for a while, my desire to save a couple bucks probably pushed up Bing's marketshare. I can't help it, I blame my overly frugal parents.

I'm not sure how this was orchestrated. I mean, I thought commodities like DVDs and CDs and XBoxes were already shaven down to the some of the lowest prices online... so what happened and who is giving me the money back? Is it Microsoft putting ad dollars to hard work for Bing or the retailer giving up some more profit margin in exchange for moving product? If anyone could shed light on how I was able to get better deals on -- sometimes any -- products on Amazon by first going through Bing, I'd appreciate it. And this isn't like a few pennies click through ad revenue, this is like tens of dollars across several purchases. Am I really that inept at how the world works to not figure this out?

So in the end, I apologize for causing all that cancer. You are correct to direct your slurs at me but I assure you that as soon as those deals dry up I will stop using Bing.

Funny story on this one. I was talking to someone about Bing Cashback and so he went to bing and tried to navigate the site and find information about the cashback program. However, he couldn't find anything. We tried using the search and the site navigation, and it was nowhere. I knew I had seen the main cashback page, and simply said to just Google it instead. So, yes that's right, he had to Google Bing (and it was the very first result). I think that is an indication of a search engine failing when you have to use another search to even find it.

I've been seeing a lot of machines lately with the Bing Toolbar installed, and the client having no idea how it got there. Automated updates on a Windows machine are nice, but sometimes you get the latest helpful tool bar offering along with it. Sun Java, Adobe Flash, etc. often offer tool bars and other goodies that although are not harmful, might be unwanted. I'm not sure how much this would skew actual results, but it has to count for a few points of market share and larger reported install base of tool bars and hence search engine use.

I've been seeing a lot of machines lately with the Bing Toolbar installed, and the client having no idea how it got there. Automated updates on a Windows machine are nice, but sometimes you get the latest helpful tool bar offering along with it.

Do you mean Live Toolbar?

WU won't install that thing quietly behind your back. You can get "Windows Live Essentials" - which contains the toolbar - via WU, but it's an optional update, meaning it will never get installed automatically - you need to go into list of updates after the check, open the "Optional" tab there, and check the product. Even then it won't install silently - it will download and then run the normal installer, and that will ask which products you'd like to install (granted, it checks the

You can't really compare traffic source percents in to how many users actually use what search engines. Your site may and most likely does rank differently in each search engine, and like you said the democracy of your visitors also affects.

Exactly. MS PAID LOTS of companies to switch to IIS. Problem is, that problems continue so a number of companies have quietly switched back to Apache and other servers, since MS only paid for the switch, not for the continued staying on IIS.
Bing will follow a similiar bell curve as more ppl realize that Bing is simply manipulated results. HOWEVER, it will never go back to flatline. The reason is that it is the default for Windows install. Considering that MSN is pretty much the default for Windows and will

Everyone is speaking of trickery to get the users. I switched my homepage over by choice - and I'm a Mac Safari user.

Reason? Much against my expectation, I found I liked the daily pictures rather than the blank of Google. I fully expected to prefer the clean look of Google (after all, it was that rather than quality of results which made me move from Alta Vista to Google many years ago.) but instead I found it was time for a change and I like the different appearance and the tagging they do I find interesting.

Search quality results - variable. Some good, some not so. It's no effort to just click the search box top-right and start using Google instead however, so effectively by having Bing as the homepage with a quickly accessible Google search I've got quick access to two potential sets of results.

So yes, I switched over for the pretty pictures. Yes, that's a shallow reason. It's doing no harm however, and I like it.

With the Google top 1000 sites being theoretically offered massive cash handouts for abandoning Google it's obvious why consumers would switch to Bing. After all, regular consumers work just like the stock market and adjust their behavior based on any rumor, right?

I'm not sure your two links prove your point. As I age, I'm getting more critical of bad user interfaces.

If you are searching for Google, then you almost certainly want http://www.google.com./ [www.google.com] Might as well show only that as sometimes less is more.

If that isn't what you wanted, click on the other results link just below and you can see lots of other stuff. But really, if you want anything other than the homepage, you are going to have to come up with a better query than "google".

I find myself using Bing quite a bit. The reason - if I'm logged into gmail or Blogger, then Google shows me as logged in when I search in another tab. I can't log out of Google search while staying logged in to gmail or blogger, so I use Bing. Why do I want to log out? I don't really know - it's not like Google can't still identify me, but it just feels icky to have them blatantly flaunt that they track my searches.

A couple of other items of note - for C# programmers, Bing is nicer in that it allows the sharp sign in a search, as opposed to google which doesn't (even though it does a mightly fine job of returning relavent results anyway). And, probably the best feature of Bing is that it's image search is really nice. You just scroll down and more results are loaded. It's worth using Bing for that feature alone.

However, the trouble with numbers like the ones in the article are that very few people will ever use only Bing. Google is still the de facto search engine, and Bing is an alternative for those times when you want something google doesn't do the way you want it to.

Seriously? I don't personally know anyone that uses Bing, and I even know a few people that aren't even aware of its existence.

I know that who I kow is a very small slice of "everyone", but still...where are these legions of people using Bing? Could the fact that many Windows Mobile phones use Bing as their default search engine be contributing to this number?

So many people have such a blinding hate for everything Microsoft that they lose all semblance of moral and logical integrity. Therefore the argument becomes puerile, unfortunately, like many of the replies above.

Anyway, back to the subject: in my opinion Bing is quite good, and has some interesting qualities. Are they enough to make people leave their "google" comfort-zone ? No, not yet. There's nothing revolutionary enough. Anyway, I really wish them well - competition is always welcome.

Note. In my experience one area where Bing really fails badly at this time is searching for references to people. Search for instance for "bruce springsteen" (with quotes). How many hits you get ? In Google you get almost 11 mils. In Bing you get around 4.5 mils. In this case, of course, there's no difference (comparing two almost infinite numbers doesn't make sense - nobody will go past page 10 anyway), but searching for less well-known people will be something else - you'll get, say, 334 hits in Google, and 2 in Bing. Now that's a huge difference ! Some of the 334 hits in google were real hits. Search for instance for your own name, or for the names of your friends, not for "celebs". That's Bing's biggest downside right now, imho.

There is no "1% Linux". Perhaps you're confused by the many distributions of Linux that offer you a choice between a Desktop (ubuntu), a server supporting the latest hardware (Fedora), a server which runs forever (CentOS), a bootable USB... well you get the point. With Linux you have choices.

So please take your attitude over to your 10% bing *LOL* (MSN search down 5 points in two months isn't a "win for bing", it's a LOSS for microsoft) with you and have a home professi

Perhaps you're confused by the many distributions of Linux that offer you a choice between a Desktop (ubuntu), a server supporting the latest hardware (Fedora), a server which runs forever (CentOS)

Since when is Fedora not for desktops?

a bootable USB

By now, most popular distributions' live CDs can be installed to a 1 GB SD card or USB stick using UNetbootin.

But seriously, the "1% desktop Linux" probably measures desktop-like tasks such as web browsing. If a site with wide appeal gets 1% of its hits from web browsers that self-report as having been built for Linux, then close to 1% of web users use Linux.

It's not really default - when you run IE for the first time on a new user account, it'll ask you if you want "Express: Bing Search", or "Custom", with neither checked by default, so you have to pick one to move on. I would imagine that more people who don't know any better pick "Express" though, so there may be something to it.

The problem is that Win7 is still at, what, ~2%? And most of its early adopters are power users or developers, who usually install a different browser pretty much first thing after t